in my dreams

In my dreams, I had a Bullet C5 Chrome Royal Enfield for my ride in my new job.  A fashionable leather jacket and a half Kevlar helmet complemented my ride.  Aviator dark sunglasses completed my everyday get up. 

This reminded me of the protagonist in an old TV series I was watching in the early 90s, Dark Justice.  It was about a judge, who was a former policeman, which could not convict criminals because of their astute exploitation of the technicalities and loop holes of the law.  By night fall, he’ll turn vigilante and bring these felons to “dark justice” with the help of his cohorts, who themselves he had convicted of minor offenses, if my memory still works perfectly.

This is rare. I hardly remember any of my dreams in the past.  But this one remained fresh when I woke up the following morning.  Usually, I just know I dreamt but could not recall what it was no matter how hard I try.

Then it hit me.  There must be something in my inner psyche that caused this.

In my first three months since I resumed working after nearly eight years, I’ve been commuting from the Playpen—our house—to my place of work.  I typically wait for a passenger jitney to pass in front of our subdivision gate, pay ten pesos and alight in front of my office building near downtown San Fernando.  On rare occasions, when I’m running late, I would ride one of those tricycles parked beside the gate, pay the driver eighty pesos,  and ask him to drop me off near a Korean car showroom at the Olongapo-Gapan Road.  From there, I'll take a short jitney ride to my office.

The thing is, I’m always in a rush every morning.  

I always hurry since I don’t want to be late for work. This even if sometimes I would just sit all day in front of my hand-me-down laptop on my hand-me-down table pretending I’m busy writing or reading something.  This early morning routine is taxing me physically.  How I wished I don’t have to rush and just take my sweet time going to my work.

That’s where the motorcycle comes in.  Every morning, I envy the mostly young men, and a few women, that pass me by on their bikes going to their work places like myself.  Not a trace of worry can be gleaned from their faces sans the mandatory helmets.  Some, obviously friends, even had the time to exchange banters.

A motorcycle will indeed come in handy not only to free me from the daily grind of early morning rush but will also spare me from waking up much earlier when I have to monitor and attend some of the activities of public schools in far flung villages of Pampanga.

On my second month, I had to observe the joint school-community multi-hazard drills in a coastal barrio of Masantol.  I had to be up at 3:30 in the morning so that I could be in time for first jitney trip from San Fernando to that town’s center.  If I’ll miss it, I won’t be able to be at the municipal port at six o’clock to catch up with the school principal and majority of the teachers of Nigui Elementary School and hitch a (free) ride in their rented banca.  I would have to shell out more than a couple of hundreds of  pesos to rent my own banca to be at the school site for the drills. 

If I have a bike, I can go directly to that coastal barangay although I’ll have to take a circuitous route and pass through some Bulacan villages.  A motorcycle, especially an enduro, would also be practical to get me to Pampanga’s villages on the elevated strip of land along the western boundary of Zambales or to Candaba Swamp and Tagalog Region villages in no time.  More importantly, my two-wheel ride would allow me to bask in the comfort and beauty of rural Pampanga.   

I actually developed this fascination for a motorcycle while overseeing a community-based disaster risk management project in Dingalan, Aurora.  CARE Philippines gave me and my project assistant an enduro to facilitate our mobility to landslide affected and threatened barrios passing through steep former logger roads and navigating rivers.  I can only drive the motorbike, though, when my assistant, who was the designated driver, is not around. I really enjoyed trudging through these challenging paths and realized the versatility of motorcycles.

I therefore enthusiastically anticipated my stint as an international development volunteer in Mombasa, Kenya in 2007 knowing I would be assigned an enduro for my mobility.  I also can’t wait to try the official helmet issued to me in the Philippines, which all along I thought was made of Kevlar but, just recently, I learned it was just fiberglass when I search its specs on the net.  The British voluntary organization advised the issuance of Kevlar helmets, if available, to all volunteers from its member-organizations worldwide.

I really made an effort to bring it back to the country in 2008 thinking it was Kevlar when all the international volunteers were prematurely repatriated to their respective countries to escape possible harm from the election fraud-induced civil strife that engulfed the Kenyan society toward the tail-end of 2007.  The full-faced helmet was still practically brand new back then.

It actually remained unused five months after I arrived in Mombasa as my placement was not what it was supposed to be based on the description and information I received when it was offered to me.  There was no organization to speak of in the first place that I was supposed to advise and help in project development and fund mobilization to ease the poverty of sectors it avowed to serve.  I therefore did not see the need to request the Yamaha DT that was supposed to be my ride and I never used my helmet except when I applied for my Kenyan driver's license.  

That helmet has been lying idly in the Playpen ever since.  I was hoping I could buy a mid-sized motorcycle that I could ride to see the smallest and remotest nooks and crannies of Pampanga and other surrounding provinces.  I was dreaming I could do a Che Guevara-like motorcycle chronicles of rural Central Luzon.  To this day, I still cling to that dream.

But then, this is not the only dream that I still cling to.  Although I’ve long accepted the fact that I won’t see the reign of social democracy in my lifetime, I still dream of a better Philippines.  Like any right thinking Filipino, I cannot be content with a country whose political leadership is described as “reactionary, greedy and corrupt on a scale seldom equaled” in one of my readings. 

Moreover, while our economy was able to sustain positive growth for the longest time in recent history and registered the second best growth rate in Asia, behind China, under the current administration, it still excludes the poor and marginalized as there is hardly any nourishing food on their tables.  By pursuing the Conditional Cash Transfer program—Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program—and increasing its allocation in the national budget every year, the government itself attests to the anti-poor nature of our economic growth.

Furthermore, as I was able to enter the public bureaucracy this late in my life, I did not only learn how corrupt our government is from the personal tales of the people I met but I also see how pervasive corruption has become in recent years. This, I’m sure, has not escaped my inner psyche.

Will you deprive this old man, then, to dream of seeing dark justice being served during his twilight years? (30)